Hitachi outs first one-disk, 7mm 500GB hard drive in the industry

Hitachi is first off the blocks with the one-disk, 7mm 500GB hard drive, adding yet another feather to their already illustrious cap. This is one piece of hardware that will definitely find a comfortable fit across many devices, as it hits the industry’s sweet spot where the 2.5-inch hard drive market is concerned. We’re talking about the spanking new thin and rugged Travelstar Z5K500 drive which enables innovative designs for ultra-portable consumer electronics devices, notebooks, netbooks and compact industrial systems. More on the Travelstar Z5K500 as we dive into the meaty part of the post after the jump.

Currently, the Travelstar Z5K500 is peerless within the industry, as it remains as the only 500GB one disk product and the only second generation 7mm product family. This is a clear push by Hitachi to move from 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives to 7mm 2.5-inch drives, and since it now comes with a 500GB capacity, it will complement the rest of its ‘family’ members of 320GB and 250GB capacities, hence satisfying over 77 percent of today’s capacity needs in the portable PC market. Meant to be direct replacements for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to notebooks, netbooks and blade servers, Hitachi looks well poised to milk this particularly lucrative and popular market segment for a long time to come.

The Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family is not only slim, it also delivers the best cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3) when compared to solid state drives (SSD), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs. That alone ought to help you part with your money easier, but there’s more. The drives sip just 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and is extremely silent at at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels. Apart from that, they are also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, where this tech will increase the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, resulting in improved drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

No word on pricing yet, but they are ready to hit the market this month.